A far future hard SF epic, The Collapsium takes quantum physics forward into a gloriously realised future where a new imperium based on Earth is built on the dream of collapsium - a building material made from black holes. It is a dream that may soon be about to end as the collapsium ring that circles the sun is in danger of collapsing into it sparking an apocalyptic chain reaction. What follows is a remarkable fusion of hard science, extravagant imagination and baroque court politics. The Collapsim marks out Wil McCarthy as one of the brightest of the new generation of SF talents.

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From Amazon

Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure. A real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot, McCarthy continually sets a very high standard for good old-fashioned space stories. In The Collapsium, McCarthy builds on a lovely novella to tell the far-future story of two scientists entrenched in a rivalry that may save, or destroy, the solar system. Tamra Lutui, the Queen of Sol, brings together the brilliant enemies in order to prevent the Ring Collapsiter, a vast ring of strange matter, from falling into the sun. So it is that Bruno de Towaji, inventor of collapsium--crystals made up of tiny black holes that can transport matter instantaneously across vast distances--must find a way to work with Marlon Sykes, who came up with the Ring to change the nature of communication forever. McCarthy makes liberal use of his extensive science knowledge, especially when he describes the nature of high-concept physics ideas like collapsium or wellstone (programmable matter!), but luckily, his literary skills are up to the task of moving the narrative along, keeping us in suspense, and creating characters who are worth reading about. His descriptions of the physical phenomena surrounding the artifacts of high-energy material manipulation are deft and fascinating:

A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become--seemingly overnight--a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead!

Towaji and Sykes labor to save the Queendom and outwit the saboteur trying to wreck the Ring, all the while burdened by a byzantine and bureaucratic social structure with demands for party appearances, verbal sparring, and quick thinking. While those of us who aren't physics mavens might quail at some of the terms and ideas McCarthy casually uses, it's his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction's masters. --Therese Littleton--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Even when faced with multiple disasters created by mankind's over-reaching itself, the future as robotics expert McCarthy (Bloom) sees it is a wondrous place, filled with interesting scientific problems and intelligent people eager to tackle those problems. Foremost among the titans of the future is Bruno de Towaji, a scientific genius so exceptionally rich he has built his own miniature planet. There he performs experiments on collapsium, a crystalline matter composed of black holes that allow for the "bending and twisting of spacetime to his personal whims." He has been at this for many years of his immortal life, until he is called out of his happy hermitage by his former lover, Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. Her scientists, led by Declarant Sykes, have built a collapsium ring around the sun that is now dangerously unstable; Bruno's expertise is needed to save the day. Bruno is used to having people need too much of him. Yet as the story progresses, what with murder and treachery being uncovered and the problems the queendom faces growing ever more complex, Bruno grows nobly into his role of both scientific and heroic savior. While there are amusing attributes and quirks to McCarthy's characters (such as Queen Tamra's virginity being a renewable asset), the greater pleasures of this novel lie in its hard science extrapolations. McCarthy plays up his technical strengths by providing a useful appendix and glossary for the mathematically inclined reader. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.

Most helpful customer reviews

This is the story of the future and the people who molded it and lived it. Our hero is a genius who invented / worked with a product that is actually a miniaturized black hole. Although the science is a little fuzzy this led to the creation of the greatest of inventions, "The Fax", which could not only send a clone of a person to another location but simultaneously fixed all that was wrong with the copy. In other words, it guaranteed imortality.The world of the future is a matriarchy with a Virgin Queen (who just happens to love our hero). An arch-villian, a desolute madman with the charms of a playboy, sets on a course that will destroy the Solar System. It sounds outlandish but the way the future is presented, particularly with well stone and the amazing nano-technology (the descriptions are perfect), is truly amazing. The tone and setting "sound" plausible. Especially endearing was the way the hero allowed one robot to develop on his own.This was an unlikely hit, mostly underground, the story carried by word of mouth. I'd love to see this on the big screen but shudder at the horror that the editors would do - they would butcher the story, reduce it to a royal affair with about as much seriousness as a Mars candy bar. The success of this book generaged another by the author, a sequeal of sorts. I can't wait to find out what happens!

______________________________________Rating: science "A+", fiction "B-" -- a dazzling hard-SF opening fades to melodrama. Worth reading for the opener and the bleeding-edge sci-tech.The Collapsium opens with a wonderful novella,"Once Upon a Matter Crushed" (first published in SF Age 5/99). In the late 25th century, in the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, gravitation and the zero-point field are pretty well understood. "Neubles," diamond-clad neutronium spheres, are in everyday use -- a standard industrial neuble masses a billion tonnes, and has a radius of 2.67 cm. Our Hero, superscientist Bruno de Towaji, is experimenting with collapsium, a dangerous, metastable material made of proton-size black holes, when he receives a Royal Summons: the new near-solar collapsiter ring is unstable, and will fall into the sun (and eat it) unless Something is Done....The book is written in an engaging neo-Victorian style -- McCarthy's first experiment with literary Style, vs. his previous 'transparent' prose. I liked it. Witty repartee, amusing pratfalls and shrewd insights abound. Bruno meets a well-married couple at a celebrity fund-raiser on Maxwell Montes, Venus: "The love, shyness and exasperation between them radiated out in invisible rays, like infrared. Warming." Befuddled by a bottomless beer mug, Bruno warms to the pitch: "Would, ah, would a hundred trillion dollars be enough?" <beat>McCarthy's sci-tech extrapolation is exotic, fun and reasonably plausible. He's clearly done his homework -- the book includes 30 pages of appendices, a glossary, technical notes (including the working equations to synthesize neubles), and respectable references. Fun stuff (really!), one of the highlights of the book.Read more ›

The Collapsium is a novel of the intermediate future. Many years from now, at least a century and probably more, mankind has machines that can build anything from a pattern, including the human body. Moreover, these facsimile (or fax) machines can be connected to transmitters and receivers to send one or more copies of someone's body pattern to other locations on the planets or in space and then to merge the copies back to a single individual. All illness, injuries, and aging are filtered out of the body pattern during transmission, thereby ensuring effective immorbidity and extreme longevity for everyone.Now that everyone is planning on living forever and has all the wealth that they can possibly use, mankind has become tired of democracy and individual responsibility, so they have created the Queendom of Sol. Fortunately, one royal personage remains after all the years of slaughtering monarchs to obtain liberty: Princess Tamatra Litui of the tiny kingdom of Tonga. Without asking her opinion on the matter, mankind has elected her Queen of Sol with an overwhelming majority and has carefully ensured that she has responsibilities, obligations and moral authority, but no real power. Furthermore, mankind has decided that she should be the Virgin Queen, but her first official act as Queen was to Censure all involved in forcing the position upon her, then her second act was to ensure that her virginity would be renewed as needed, and her third act was to call for suitors.In this novel, Bruno de Towaji is a Declarant-Philander; that is, he has been granted the highest honor in the Kingdom for his construction of the Iscog (Inner-System Collapsiter Grid) linking the inner planets and he has been further honored as one of the Queen's consorts.Read more ›

Maybe it's because I'm an old f**t, but I think a lot of reviewers have missed a key theme of this book.I'll quickly mention points made by others before I center in on the immortality & "meaning of life" themes I've found here.First, this is hard science fiction, but if like me you're no scientist, there is a way to read it and get the gist of the science without getting hopelessly confused.Secondly, while the second half of the book is more serious with bad things happening, there's a playful perspective to the entire book that can be compared to fairy tales, or to "Tom Swift" solutions, or to glorious "pulp" science-fiction of the '30's and '40's. This might put off some readers and charm others.However you react to the hard science and/or the allusions tomore faniful genres, don't overlook what is being said about immortality.The novel's protagonist and antagonist are both among the first to embark into immortal life and are reacting to such a life's implications. As if immortality isn't enough to deal with, there's also the faxing of people creating copies of individuals who have the memories and personalities of the originals but go into divergent paths.The principal character, after a long period of being the Queen's "Philander", has become a hermit buried in endless scientific research which will hopefully enable him to see the end of time. His opposite number, also for a time the Queen's "Philander", has a similar goal, but due to his immortality has become what could be thought of as a souless entity, with little regard for humanity.Read more ›